[plug] Looking Glass

[Brad Campbell]

Has anyone played with Looking Glass? looking-glass.io.

I've been using VMs to contain Windows since Win4Lin was introduced for Windows 98. I use a windows VM daily for stuff where I need Office or AutoCAD.
I even use it for Revit, although as you cam imagine the software rendering is pretty sluggish for 3D. Recently I upgraded my VideoCAD system and
it has a hard requirement for OpenGL 3. It simply crashes if that isn't present. Before I went and bought a little Windows box to plug in I thought I'd
have a look at the state of 3D on VMS and stumbled across Looking Glass.

I know people have been using VFIO for years to pass a GPU into the guest, but that still required a hard display output. Looking Glass captures the rendered 
output and feeds it through to the client running on the host using shared memory. Originally designed for gamers, it turned out to solve my problem nicely.

>From my perspective the only downside is the shared memory means I need to run the VM on my desktop rather than on the fat and noisy host sitting in the shed.
There are worse problems to have. The desktop is a 6 core with 64G of ram, so most of the time I run the VM from a ramdisk anyway.

My old nVidia card I had stuffed in a drawer didn't do proper DX 12, so I had to lash out $90 for a GT1030, but passed through to the guest everything just 
works. It doesn't do dual head like I can do with spice, so instead I just make one big window 5112x1432 and it spans 2 of my displays. It also works just 
fine for most things with no GPU, you just don't get the additional performance. I need the GPU for the Cad software though.

If you like playing with VMs or are sick of dual booting for games, this is seriously worth a look. It's like RDP on steroids :
- Super low latency and high refresh display (these gaming guys are running > 240fps)
- Low latency sound passthrough without having to fart around with qemu emulated sound cards (which I never got to work well)
- and my absolute favourite feature. Native clipboard cut and paste. Not just text, but any media type your recipient supports.

I can cut and paste pretty much anything between host and guest, including directories full of files. For me that's a game changer.
I moved a 9G iso between the host and guest at ~1GB/s. Guest to host can be a bit slower because of fuse overhead, but it's still a ton faster than bouncing files
over a SMB connection.

Apparently it has been around since 2017, but I only stumbled across it a month ago and it has changed parts of my workflow significantly. My son now has it
on his PC so we can keep his on-line windows games contained and he loves it too.

Regards,
Brad